“I… we didn’t—” I began, but Jess cut me off with a casual flick of her hand.
“Please. I would have done the same thing. In fact, if you hadn’t had a good snoop around, I would have written you both off as idiots,” she said, throwing herself onto the bed and looking through her beverages for something she could still drink. “Find anything good?”
Again, Nova and I just looked at each other. Then Nova pointed to the drawer in the bedside table. “We found a book. A really old one.”
Jess glanced at the drawer and nodded. “Thorough. I’m impressed.”
She didn’t seem angry, so I added, “We couldn’t figure out what language it was in.”
Jess laughed. “I’ve been studying it for years, and I still suck at it. It’s Gaelic. Irish, mostly, though it’s all antiquated, and so there’s some Scottish Gaelic and old Britannic mixed in as well. I doubt anyone could read it who wasn’t—” She cut herself off.
“Who wasn’t what?” I asked eagerly.
Jess sighed, and took a long sip from the one iced coffee that still had any lingering fragments of ice in it. She seemed to be considering me, choosing her next words very carefully. Finally, she put the cup down with a sigh of resignation.
“What about her?” she asked, pointing at Nova.
“What about me?” Nova asked, bristling.
Jess ignored her, still staring intently right at me. “Do you trust her?”
I shot a glance at Nova, whose face was twisted with defiance and—more surprisingly—nerves. I realized that she wasn’t sure of my answer. As for me, after everything Nova and I had been through together since I came to Sedgwick Cove, I was sure.
“Yeah, I do. She’s literally put her life on the line to help me, and she came tonight to help you with no questions asked—or at least, with a lot of her questions left unanswered. I trust her completely.”
Out of the corner of my eye, I could see Nova’s cheeks were flushing. I didn’t look at her, though, because among the many things I trusted about Nova was the fact that she would absolutely deck me if I caught her being even remotely vulnerable. Jess had no interest in how Nova was reacting. All she cared about, evidently, was what I had to say. And after I’d said it, she nodded once, decisively, and that seemed to be it. If I trusted Nova, apparently so did she.
“Okay, Vesper. Now that we’ve established you’re both trustworthy, that means your word means something. So I need both of you to give me your word that you won’t tell anyone anything I’m about to divulge to you, unless I tell you it’s okay. It’s for my protection, as well as the protection of the people I love. It will also keep you out of danger.”
How could we not agree? We murmured the required promise.
Jess’ shoulders relaxed, and her voice was a little less tense as she continued. “Good. Now, this conversation will probably be a little bit easier than it usually is, because you both already understand that the world is more complicated than most people believe,” Jess said. “For instance, I don’t have to convince either of you that ghosts are real. You already accept that as fact.”
I nodded. Beside me, Nova did the same. It seemed like we were both holding our breath.
“I belong to a sort of… sisterhood. Our sisterhood has many families—we call them clans, and each clan is a separate bloodline that passes the same gift down through the generations. Correct me if I’m mistaken, but I think your covens work in a similar way?” she added, looking back and forth between us.
Nova and I locked eyes, each of us silently asking the other if we should answer. Here I’d been expecting answers from Jess, but I hadn’t really been counting on giving any of my own. But she was giving us what seemed to be secret information, and so it didn’t seem fair to refuse a trade in kind. A secret for a secret? Nova made a movement somewhere between a nod and a shrug, and that seemed to be enough discussion.
“Yeah, that’s right,” Nova said, as we both turned back to Jess. “And just like you, there might be some questions that we can’t answer.”
“Fair enough,” Jess said. “Anyway, throughout history, members of our sisterhood have often been labeled as witches, and even burned at the stake or hanged for the mistaken association, so you’ll have to pardon me if it seems like I’m trying to put distance between us. No disrespect meant. It’s just that my only run-in with witchcraft prior to this was kind of disastrous. But we’re not meant to wield your sort of magic, and I imagine the reverse is also true.”
“Well, since our first run-in with your type of magic involved reanimating corpses, I think it’s safe to say the feeling is mutual,” Nova said dryly.
Jess snorted. “I like her. And technically, I wasn’t a corpse. At least, not in the usual sense. Let me back this up, though, I’m getting ahead of myself. My sisterhood is called the Durupinen. We are the keepers of the gates between the worlds of the living and the dead.”
A shiver, delicate and fluttering, shot up my spine like the fingers of a ghost.
“There are places in the world where the veil between the world of the living and the world of the dead are very thin—thin enough thattrapped spirits can slip through with just a little help. As Durupinen, we help lead them to those places and provide that help, if they need it.”
“So you’re like… what, psychic mediums?” I asked.
Jess snorted. “Psychic mediums wish they were that cool. There are others out there who can sense spirits—we call them sensitives. But only the Durupinen have the control of the Gateways—we call them Geatgrimas, in our lore. But the point is, spirits who are lost find us—they seek us out, and we help them however we can, whether it’s completing their unfinished business for them, or simply helping them find their way across to the spirit world.”
“This is all super interesting,” I said. “But I’m struggling to understand what it has to do with us and the grimoire.”
“Well, I lied to you,” Jess said. “About how I came across the book? I’m sorry about that. It’s just that sometimes it’s easier to interact with living people if I don’t mention the ghost stuff. I thought you’d believe me more easily if I gave you a mundane story about how I found the book and tracked you down, instead of the real story.”
